Why should a small business blog?
If you know what a blog is and how to use it then don’t read any further but people I talk to still ask me quite often what a business blog is and why have one. Although it is extra work on top of the normal workload of running a business there is no better way than informing your customers and potential customers what is happening in your company.
A business blog is known to be one of the best ways to generate traffic to your site. But having a business blog is not just about getting driving visitors to your site but about informing the ones that do arrive and helping the visitor to get to know you and see that you know what you are talking about. Being able to generate information on your website easily will also help if you are entering into a marketing campaign as you can create a ’specific’ landing page for your direct mailing or email newsletter campaign.
What is a blog?
For a detailed account of what a blog is then go over to the wiki describing it. But this might be overwhelming. In it’s simplest form, a business blog is an area of your website where you can write ‘articles’. Each ‘article’ is placed under a category. The list of category you decide on. So for example a simple set of categories you may create would be :
- Case Studies
- In the newspaper
- Testimonials/Happy Customers
- New Services
- Tips
- Events Diary
- Special Offers
The list is endless but it is often quite effective to have just a 4-5 categories.
Now when we talk about ‘articles’, it doens’t have to a full blown essay. For example, an entry in the ‘events Diary’ may well only be a few lines long.
How to have a blog on my website
There are a number of ways of having a business blog. The ones I get involved in are:
1. As a bolt on to exiting websites. So that the blog would have an address like www.yoursite.co.uk/blog. The ‘blog’ is designed so that it looks and feels like your existing site with links and menus back to the main site. This is quite an inexpensive option.
2. Your website is converted so that the whole website is now running using the blogging system. In the long run this is a better option if you have a website which is currently difficult to update as you can then add/delete pages, add images and all sorts of wonderful features on your main site.
